With the growing awareness of corporate misuse of private user information and increases in identity theft, users are looking for ways to protect their privacy. One approach is for a user to compartmentalize their activities so that tracking of their activities and collection of their personal information is both limited in scope and is not useful. One method to achieve compartmentalization is for a user to create multiple synthetic identities and use them for different purposes. For example, one identity is used for online shopping, another identity for social media interaction and another for use in a real world social situation when meeting a new person. The compartmentalization limits the scope and usefulness of information collected about an identity's online and offline activities, and minimizes the impact when identity data is stolen.
For a user to be effective with their multiple synthetic identities, a user needs access to a full suite of capabilities that allows them to operate in the context of that identity. For example, they may need a different name, phone number, email address, shipping address and so on and be able to uses these capabilities when operating in the context of the identity.
There is a need to provide email for a user to operate safely in the context of a synthetic identity. In any given week a user may operate with their real identity and with a number of synthetic identities. The user needs to be enabled to use their email across those identities without inadvertently disclosing their identities.
A review of current email systems shows that they are not suitable for managing synthetic identities. Email clients (technically Message User Agents or MUAs) are designed for supporting aggregation of the user's email accounts into one view. The email clients allow the user to enter username/password information for a number of email providers (technically Message Transfer Agents (MTAs) or Message Delivery Agents (MDAs)).
Additionally the process of creating each of those email accounts is outside of the scope of the email client and may involve the user working through complex and different registration process at each email provider. These email providers want real identity information such as name, email address, date of birth and mobile phone number. Giving up real identity data for each synthetic identity is not desirable.
Existing email clients are designed for aggregation rather than identity compartmentalization. That is, the email clients do not provide the capabilities to ensure a user stays in context of a particular identity.
Email providers themselves are unsuitable for synthetic identities. Some synthetic identities are short lived and the synthetic identity email accounts need to be easily created and deleted at will by the user. With the complex registration process and the lack of assurance that accounts and emails will ever be deleted from current email providers, they are unsuitable to serve both the dynamic nature and privacy requirements of synthetic identities.
Email providers give no assurance of the privacy of the user's emails, and in most cases the providers themselves declare in their terms and conditions that they can use the email content for their own purposes. Add to that the exposure of real identity data at each email provider and one is left with an inadequate privacy environment for synthetic identities.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for an email application that supports synthetic identities.